Across the Houston Independent School District and countless others, teachers have been devalued by Value Added Models too complicated to be understood by the very policymakers that adopted these flawed instruments. In this remarkable and important essay, Jeff Bryant explains how current teacher evaluation systems need to be re-evaluated.

Our students’ families should be educated on how much teachers’ unions and they have in common. Schools in Houston have been shuttered under the pretense that teachers have failed the school when in fact the district has failed to offer the financial and social support that these schools most need.

This is an excellent infographic which demonstrates the tactics that are being implemented locally and across Texas by corporate reformers to dismantle public schools and siphon tax dollars to charter schools that service a very narrow population of students – primarily non-English Language Learners, non-special education. The tax dollars that are siphoned are the very tax dollars that public schools (which are left with a greater proportion of ELLs and SpEd students) need to adequately meet the demands and challenges that these students face.

There have been too many experiments that have been questionable in the district and regrettably the losers have been the neighborhood schools that need the most support. It’s time to reevaluate the ideology and replace it with one that works.